Frankly, I'm surprised that you got four downloads!

I'm not saying your app is bad, I'm sure it's perfectly fine and does what it purports to do. The UI looks nice. I just find it incredibly difficult to believe that any sort of market exists for the product you've produced: people who are expecting a child, and want that child to have a Danish name, and are unwilling to Google search (or ask ChatGPT etc) for eg "Danish boy names" AND are willing to pay $4.99 (mostly) sight unseen for a premium experience with baffling features ("Names you have favorited can easily be shared with your loved ones directly from the app"? Surely I could just, like... tell them the name?)

The conclusion you seemed to reach ("no one is buying paid apps") doesn't make a lot of sense. Plenty of people are buying paid apps. What you have discovered is that the Dutch Lifestyle section of the app store gets very little traffic and that an extraordinarily niche app can rank with a user base you can count on one hand.

Why do I have to pick the factors first? Do I have to use all of them? Why shouldn't I use all of them? If I do, why aren't they already picked?

Why are all of these sliders? Why don't they start at zero? Why do all of them at the default setting result in me winning?

Speaking of, am I winning? Failure and success give me the same feedback. I can play this game over and over until I win? That's not really in the Wordle style.

imo you should be picking from a palette of maybe-relevant factors and increasing/decreasing their order of magnitude and order/operation, then when you submit you're locked into a win/loss state like wordle. This would be much more of a game than what you've got here.

A better palette of possible factors was something I thought about. It will require rewriting nearly the whole app, but it's likely the direction I'll go when I make v2.

To take it a step further I thought I could use even smaller building blocks via dimensional "toolboxes" like quantity, distance, volume, and conversions and each question files its factors into each tool box (with some dummies like you said). Do you think that'd be more interesting? It's more complex though so mass appeal might go down.

> mass appeal might go down

I don't think Fermi questions have mass appeal anyway. I don't think most people know what "order of magnitude" means, let alone understand dimensional analysis (ie., the conceptual idea of what it means for units to cancel).

I don't think making the game a little more complex would really affect its appeal, because it's already targeted at people with a certain level of scientific understanding.

Good call. It easy to forget that the world isn't as nerdy as me lol. This would definitely let me focus the game a lot better anyway.

OTOH, not so long ago, a colleague and I tried to guess the number of piano tuners in large cities, e.g. New York. I find your idea nice, but the execution could be more flexible, more puzzle-like. E.g., you could have units (like #passengers, #planes, #flights, time), and the user can create factors out of those.

But I'm afraid that it'll lose its appeal after a while. These problems seem same-y to me, more so than Wordle.

Musk's apparent thinking was that it would have been easier to wriggle his way out of the Twitter purchase than the fines (around 1bn, if I recall correctly)

turned out not to be the case!

if twitter were very strongly moderated it might have helped, but as it stands now it's a $8 fee for scammers to push their scams to the top of any thread. Even if they get banned every so often it's a great value proposition. Can't tell you the number of verified 𝕏 crypto scams I've seen since the rebrand, most of which seem to still be up.

famously, no one with a lot of money has ever made a bad business decision

Both Tesla and SpaceX are successful almost entirely in buying out the work of other people and exploiting government programs. If you already had a bunch of money (thanks to being in the right place at the right time w/r/t PayPal) you too could have done it if you didn't care about anything other than your own aggrandizement

If the only criteria is that you had money from a prior successful company (Paypal in Elon’s case) to create the preeminent electric car company in the world, then why didn’t many thousands of other people achieve it as well? Why was there not more competition? Why did so many attempts to market electric cars fail before Tesla? The reason is that it is hard, and it takes a combination of both skill and luck to accomplish.

The reason is that no one was in a position to exploit the EV credit system because it didn't exist yet. Right place, right time, only made possible by having a bunch of money and zero qualms about exploiting that program.

Yeah. Same reason no-one is emulating Gates or Jobs right now. Their oportunity was related to their historical moment. It has passed. People will be in the right time and place for _other_ opportunities (see Zuckerberg, Bezos)

The argument is that everything was already in place for it to become the preeminent electric car company in the world; Musk simply had to buy it at the right time, which he did.

Now, that may be a skill in and of itself, but that's not a skill for innovation, it's a skill for timing markets.

The Tesla model S was released before Elon arived. I don't doubt that his money helped but it seems fair to question whether that equates to Musk "creat[ing] the preeminent electric car company in the world"

I will give him credit in as much that he is an exceptional con man uniquely skilled at fleecing investors and moneyed nerds. Still, though, that hype machine couldn't have been built without his gobs of money and utter lack of scruples.

All the money in the world won’t get you relandable rockets or put EVs on the map unless you have talent.. to set direction/vision, make partnerships, find talent that wants to work with you, etc.

If money alone was enough we’d see more Teslas from places like Saudia Arabia. But we don’t.

I don't think other governments are stupid enough to let their taxpayers float poorly made cars that keep exploding because the guy in charge keeps talking about self-driving functionality that will never arrive

correct, the term he should have used is "con man"

they can't "code", they can't "explain a joke", they can output cached human data in such a way that it seems like they're generating these things themselves.

what do you mean by this exactly? like whats an experiment which establishes the difference? a lot of human behavior is also only liminally generative cached retrieval

good